Quote
The poet Rumi describes the many vehicles for awakening:
Some people work and become wealthy.
Others do the same and remain poor.
Marriage fills one with energy,
Another it drains.
Don’t trust ways, they change.
A means flails about like a donkey’s tail.
Always add the gratitude clause
To any sentence, if God wills,
then go …
Kornfield, Jack. A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life
A good reminder (for myself) that everyone is on their own path - tradition says there are 84,000 teachings of the Buddha, and there is one for every type of person. The trick is to find the right key for the right lock. Much of my study now focuses on understanding more means to help more people, and my prayer is that all of us can find the right path.
Links
More weirdness - further explanation of why local realism is false (the 2022 Nobel Prize demonstrated this).
More on the constructed nature of our reality - a wonderfully detailed history of the linguistic relativity hypothesis (aka Sapir-Whorf).
YouTube has all kinds of cool Buddhist documentaries available for free — I had no idea that Werner Herzog made a documentary about a Tantric initiation ritual. Must watch!
On “My Reincarnation” (the Namkhai Norbu documentary)
I watched this and really enjoyed it. Highly recommend. Wanted to share a few takeaways:
Actually this is largely about his son, Yeshi, who grew up in Italy, and had a challenging relationship with his father and with his place within Buddhism. One specific detail - from a young age, Yeshi has some extraordinary dream visions and experiences. And yet early on he dismisses them as not grounds for any kind of belief. On the one hand it’s striking the degree to which one can dismiss anomalous events that fall outside of our world model. On the other hand, he’s right that the ground of faith must run deeper than simply a few weird dreams.
It is striking the degree to which Namkhai Norbu is a normal guy, bowling, swimming, teaching language etc. We can even question his parenting decisions and wonder if he was unable to really connect with his kids emotionally. We can see some of the unresolved consequences of that. We tend to build up teachers as these saints - and therefore think we can never be realized like that. But that is a limiting belief and great spiritual masters are in many respects normal people with many of the same challenges and struggles that we all face. Devotion to a path or a teacher does not mean ignoring their faults.
That being said, there is a grace, love, kindness and wisdom that Norbu clearly emanates. Two examples — his wisdom in allowing his son to lead a normal life despite being a reincarnated master - “if he really is the reincarnation, we will see how he manifests.” Second there is a moving scene where a sick and very distressed person asks him for healing — Norbu’s advice is to see a doctor and do a practice for some stress relief. Norbu wasn’t thinking about how this sick person could become a Buddha — he was meeting the man where he was and doing his best to give advice that would reduce his (relative, not ultimate) suffering. Very inspiring.